America’s greatest potential military competitors—namely Russia and China—are developing game changing capabilities to deny U.S. forces the ability to enter into contested military theaters. Moscow and Beijing are also spending billions of dollars to modernize and upgrade their armed forces, while at the same time Washington underfunds, undertrains and underappreciates the threats of the future. While there are many possible solutions to this growing great power challenge, one seems almost too incredible to imagine, seemingly pulled from the pages of your favorite comic book to be real. This potential solution: drone swarms.

OK, stick with me here for a moment—and no,I haven’t been watching too many Terminator movies. U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter,speaking recently at the Economic Club of Washington, previewed the idea. A special endeavor is being championed by the recently created Pentagon Strategic Capabilities Office: small, swarming drones that are being built mostly from parts created by 3D printers. Carter noted that "they've developed micro-drones that are really fast, and really resilient." Carter added that the machines “can fly through heavy winds and be kicked out the back of a fighter jet moving at Mach 0.9. . . or they can be thrown into the air by a soldier in the middle of the Iraqi desert."

Scharre, who worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and played a key role in crafting policies on unmanned and autonomous systems, not only gets the problems:

“The U.S. military is at a crisis point. We are staring down the barrel of a future where U.S. military technological superiority may no longer be a given wherethe military strength that has undergirded global security since World War II may be in question. The technologies that have given the U.S. military its edge stealth, long-range sensors, communications networks and precision-guided weapons are proliferating to other actors. As a result, so-called “anti-access” challenges threaten traditional modes of power projection. While individual U.S. ships, planes and tanks remain more capable one-on-one, the pernicious “death spiral” of rising costs and shrinking procurement quantities means that the United States has increasingly fewer and fewer assets to bring to the fight. The U.S. military will have to fight significantly outnumbered, and even the qualitative advantages U.S. assets have will not be sufficient. Quality matters, but numbers matter too. At a certain point, U.S. aircraft and ships will simply run out of missiles.”

But he sees a big-think solution:

“Swarms of low-cost robotic systems can overwhelm enemies, saturating their defenses. Cooperatively, they can operate with greater coordination, intelligence and speed on the battlefield than manned systems.”

And this might be the best part:

“Perhaps most significantly, they can help to bend the cost curve downward [think about expensive systems like the F-35, for example], allowing the United States to field large quantities of systems that, in aggregate, retain qualitative superiority. Disaggregating complex, multimission systems into larger numbers of lower-cost systems is a potential way to increase resiliency, diversity and impose costs on adversaries—and to do so affordably. But harnessing the advantages of this approach will require a new paradigm for how we build next-generation military systems.”

If crafted in the way Scharre lays out, Russia and China would surely have something to worry about:

“As the United States begins to grapple withpossible responses to the anti-access challenge, a ‘flood the zone’ approach should be an option in the U.S. toolkit. Large numbers of low-cost, uninhabited and autonomous systems can overwhelm enemy defenses and act as decoys, scouts and “missile trucks” for human-inhabited systems. Because of their greater persistence, uninhabited systems could be seeded into the battlespace weeks or months ahead of time where they lurk unseen, allowing an early toehold in gaining access.”

Scharre, to his credit, does list some of the potential challenges—like some military positions becoming obsolete—but clearly the benefits outweigh the downsides: